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Sjuzhet (usually refers to narrative discourse) is the representation and reshaping of underlying events through narration into plot (& in film by camera angles, in film and novels via flashbacks in temporal sequence, etc.). Sjuzhet is a Russian Formalist term. It is used by Vladimir Propp and by Shklovsky (see Boje, 2007, Chapter 2). Russian Formalists (Propp & Shklovsky) posit narrative as the sjuzhet (the plot) and story as the fabula (the chronology of event). Fabula (usually refers to story), is defined as the chronological sequence of events reconstructed/reported in a narrative work.
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Critical Reviews of Sjuzhet and Fabula
Critiques of Sjuzhet and Fabula fall under the headings of poststructuralism, symbolic interaction, language studies, and Native story writers.
POSTSTRUCTURALISM
Jonathan Culler's (1981: 170-172) critique of Sjuzhet and Fabula is that they constitute a double move. The first move is to set Sjuzhet (narrative) in hierarchical domination over Fabula (story). Story becomes relegated in the first move to a mere chronology of event. In the second move, narrative self-deconstructs its initial duality, in order to double back to efface the order of event (Culler, 1981: 171). Jacques Derrida (1991) is also critical of the logocentric hierarchic ordering of Sjuzhet and Fabula. He raises the question of what if there are story ways of telling as well as narrative ways of telling. And if so, how is it that narrative in the American-European tradition has become privileged over story. One answer is that since narrative is both Sjuzhet (emplotment) and a subjection of Fabula (the stuff of story, represented through narrative). For example, Derrida views narrative a having a terrible secret, in its way of oppressing story: "… The question-of-narrative covers with a certain modesty a demand for narrative, a violent putting-to-the-question an instrument of torture working to wring the narrative out of one as if it were a terrible secret in ways that can go from the most archaic police methods to refinements for making (and even letting) one talk that are unsupposed in neutrality and politeness, that are most respectfully medical, psychiatric, and even psychoanalytic. (Derrida, 1991, p. 261)." If story is more than Fabula, dominated by narrative, it could have its own manner of discourse, rather than being subordinate to narrative. Derrida plays with just such an idea as follows in setting story in relation to its homonym: "Each 'story' (and each occurrence of the word 'story,' (of itself), each story is at once larger and smaller than itself, includes itself without including (or comprehending) itself, identifies itself with itself even as it remains utterly different from its homonym" (Derrida, 1991: 267).
SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM
Jerome Bruner also raises issues about Sjuzhet and Fabula. Bruner summarizes Sjuzet as the plot of narrative, and Fabula as timeless underling theme (Bruner, 1986, pp. 7, 17-21). Bruner wants Fabula to be a little more "loose fitting: a constraint on story: "I think we would do well with as loose fitting a constraint as we can manage concerning what a story must 'be' to be a story" (p. 17). The problem for Bruner is to explore the underlying narrative structures (Sjuzhets) in not only Russian Formalism, but also French Structuralists (Barthes, Todorov, and others). The European formalists posit narrative grammars (i.e. Todorov's simple transformations of mode, intention, result, manner, aspect & status, as well as complex transformations of appearance, knowledge, supposition, description, subjectification, & attitude). For Bruner, the story (Fabula stuff) becomes the "virtual text" (p. 32) to the narrative grammars.
LANGUAGE STUDIES
Mikhail Bakhtin is also not convinced that Sjuzhet and Fabula is a complete explanation of the relationship of narrative and story. Like Derrida, Bakhtin is suspicious of the hegemonic relation of narrative has over story. For Bakhtin (1973: 12) “narrative genres are always enclosed in a solid and unshakable monological framework.” Story, for Bakhtin, is decidedly more dialogical, for example in the “polyphonic manner of the story” (Bakhtin, 1973: 60). Benjamin Whorf (1956: 256), following up an observation by Franz Boas, contended that the Hopi Indians do not experience themselves, or life as narrative grammar, or pattern. Rather than past-present-future, as segregated narrative Sjuzhet, the Hopis experience is one of "eventing." Shotter (1993: 109) refers to Whorf's "eventing" and to the Hopi's differences with Euro-American space and time. Parr-Davis (see web resources) poses several critiques of Whorf's theory that it was just the linguistic patterns of speech that changed how time and space were being narrated (or emplotted via Sjuzhet).
NATIVE WRITERS ON STORY
Finally, an increasing number of Native-indigenous authors are positing a more vibrant role of story, beyond Fabula, and in resistance to Euro-American Formalist and Structuralist narrative. For example Leslie Marmon Silko (1981) says "White ethnologists reported that the oral tradition among Native American groups has died out" (p. 28). Narrative Sjuzhet/Fabula tends to turn native story into museum artifacts, as archetype narratives devoid of "harsh realities of hunger, poverty and injustice" (p. 280), and that Native story traditions were "erroneously altered by the European intrusion - principally by the practice of taking the children away from the tellers who had in all past generations told the children an entire culture, an entire identity of a people" (p. 6). The idea here is that story competencies are taught in the tribe, and the story memory, passed from generation to generation is disrupted by pulling children out of the home, forbidding their language, etc. Thomas King (2005 in The Truth About Stories, agues that narrative compromises story. The Fabula of story, the social fabric of story loses its voice. King argues that story shapes identity differently from narrative. In particular the Indian identity concocted in American-European ethnology, folklore, anthropology, history, and literature --- is being challenged by Native writers. James Cox (2006) looks at narrative (in the tradition of Euro-American enterprise of Sjuzhet/Fabula) as "tools of domination: (p. 24), and a "colonial incursion" (p. 25).
POSSIBLE LINES OF INQUIRY
Antenarrative - The antenarrative is defined as the double move of a bet (ante) or a before (ante) of story on its way to narrative (Boje, 2001). One way to approach Sjuzhet and Fabula is to assume that the story stuff of Fabula is antecedent to Sjuzhet plotedness of narrative. This would be consistent with Paul Ricoeur's (1983) Time and Narrative, in which first memesis is a pre-story to second memesis of emplotment, which is antecedent to the third memesis of making sense of plottedness. This is the basis for a hermeneutics of narrative. A second line of inquiry would look at Sjuzhet and Fabula as antenarratives that can defragment or otherwise unweave narrative emplotment (Sjuxhet), rendering them into story stuff (Fabula). In other words, instead of assuming a conception of time that is spatial (Shotter, 1993), as a spatial-past, spatial-present, and spatial-future, there would be other kinds of Bakhtin (1981) chronotopes (space-time relativities).
Web Resources
- Boje, David. Boje, (2007). Storytelling Organization
- Pateman, Trevor. English Formalism and Russian Formalism: Clive Bell and Viktor Shklovsky
- Parr-Davies, Neil. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: A Critique
See also
References
- Bakhtin, M. (1973). Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (C. Emerson, Ed. & Trans.). Manchester, England: Manchester University Press.
- Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin (ed. Holquist, M.). Austin: University of Texas Press.
- Boje, D. M. (2001). Narrative Methods for Organizaitonal and Communication Research. London: Sage.
- Boje, David M. (2007). Storytelling Organization. London: Sage. Chapter 2 develops the Sjuzhet and Fabula monologic aspects of Russian Formalism.
- Bruner, Jerome. (1986). Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MASS.: Harvard University Press.
- Cox, James. (2006). Muting White Noise: The Subversion of Popular Culture Narratives of Conquest in Sherman Alexie's Fiction. University of Oklahoma Press.
- Culler, Jonathan. (1981). The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
- Derrida, Jacques. (1991). A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. Peggy Kamuf (Editor). NY: Columbia University Press. Note: The Derrida quotes on narrative and story come from an essay, ‘Living On – Border Lines’ in Deconstruction and Criticism (NY: Seabury Press, edited by Harold Bloom, 1979)
- King, Thomas. (2003). The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: House of Ananasi.
- Propp, Vladimir. (1928/1968). Morphology of the Folk Tale. English trans. Laurence Scott. TX: University of Texas Press (first published in Moscow in 1928; English, 1968).
- Shklovsky, Viktor. (1917/1965). Art as Technique in L T Lemon and M Reis, eds., (1965) Russian Formalist Criticism. University of Nebraska Press.
- Shotter, John (1993). Conversational Realities. London: Sage.
- Silko, Leslie Marmon. (1981). Storyteller. NY: Arcade Publishing
- Worf, Benjamin Lee (1956). Language, Thought and Reality - Selected Writings.
